Back yonder in '97, a show named Buffy debutted on a tiny nothing-network called the dubya-bee.

The interbunny, she was a place reserved for the dorkiest of dorks, and white-collar workers stuffed into beige cubicles like so much veal. Socialization bad. Starved for communication, some sort of contact, in need of serious slack time, the veal-people fired up Netscape and surfed the web. And it was good.

Then, in a chocolate-meets-peanut butter stroke of genius, veal-people who watched and liked this dubya-bee show surfed over to the Bronze, the official site for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, designed by a boy named TV James for a company called UTV. Or something.

It was a guestbook, really. But people posted their thoughts there. Others replied to those thoughts. They had conversations. This was long ago, of course, There was Usenet, the Well, and AOL chat rooms, so this wasn't new ground, but it was still suckling at the teat.

A boy named Joss Whedon showed up one day and said hello, that his name rhymed with "hoss bleedin.'" And that was good.

Because Buffy was a pretty show, the dubya-bee grew and grew, and could afford a bigger webhost. So the board was taken over by a nice man named Justin, who owned a company called Apollo interactive.

The veal-people, who were calling themselves Bronzers, now, went postal. "Will there be changes? We like our board. We want it to stay the same."

And so they petitioned this Justin fellow, and since he was a kind man, he kept TVJames' guestbook format, and his VIP color codes that said to the world that he was an important fellow.

Fast forward to Buffy jumping off a scaffolding, a bidding war between the dubya-bee and a network called yoopeein. Dubya-bee lost. And the Bronzers received an eviction notice. "GET OFFA MY LAWN," bellowed the dubya-bee.

And the mighty Joss decreed that it would all be okay, that he would make sure that the yoo-pee-in folks did the right thing, and would open its doors to us.

And the Joss went away. And the Bronze went away. And we waited for our home to turn up, huddling closer to fires in various refugee camps set up by folks like THE Kristen, and Artie n' Phoenix, who opened the Bronze Beta, a place to rest until we got to the Promised Land.

Meanwhile, their were evil plots afoot! An Apollo Interactive employee (who was a locker person getting a hard-on off sycophantic devotees longing for home) STOLE THE BRONZE. 'Cept, we didn't know it was stolen. THE Kristen offered to host the Bronze, except it was coded in C++, and she did not speak that language.

"'Lo!" I exclaimed. "Polgara, the Code Queen has a Rosetta Stone for this puzzle!"

And so Polgara looked over the files and said, "This is the genuine article, I can see Joss' password. Cool."

We awaited word from Justin that it was okey to launch. None came. We called him. He went apeshit that the stole Bronze.

And that was that. All that was left was the Beta. Some folks were unhappy with the management. They left for higher ground.

Like the fucking Lost Tribe, except without matzo.

I am far too lazy to fix all those typos.

The moral of the story is, don't depend on a corporate board. Have a back up board ready for downtime, and in case your internet community gets shut down.

Buffistas smart.

Ahhhhh, I see. In the bits and pieces I shoved together in my head, I pictured a board divided, a great battle, and then a band of ruffians banding together and taking themselves overseas to start a new!colony that was the Buffistas.

I'm so into history. Ima find me the very first Buffista posts and poke around.

Thank you, Allyson. I yike stories.

Allyson telleth the official history. But there was the blood of the Bronze that I loved. The posters themselves. Many were smart people. Funny, witty, lovers of the argument. Disagreement, debate were honored. They used words like swords -- sometimes they unfairly wounded but mostly they did the honorable battle. (I have heard of the Color Wars and the Topic Wars, and much blood was spilt.)

Board got bigger as the show grew in popularity. The Bronze was, for want of a better description, the intake value of Buffy on-line fandom for most new internet fans. 'Twas good to have new blood, but there was also a change in the culture. More bezoars. More chatroom-like behavior. More VIP-hunters. But some real diamonds too. Allyson is one. There were many, many others.

TheWB shutting the Bronze (prematurely) was tough, but UPN never getting the new board right really did drive the final massive fragmentation of the community. I love the Beta features (look -- spoiler font and we can edit!), but the sense of the broader Bronzer community never really did vest there for me.

He went apeshit that the stole Bronze.

That's not really true. He was very nice about the whole thing. The guy who stole it, however, went completely apeshit. And then proceeded to tell people that I had hacked into the WB servers and stolen the code. Which was, apparently, why I closed JWnet and SGcom. It was part of my plea bargain.

I guess Tim didn't mind that his webmaster was cybercriminal. Or maybe he didn't get the memo.

The moral of the story is, don't depend on a corporate board. Have a back up board ready for downtime, and in case your internet community gets shut down.

Wrod. Signed, former Pathfinder/Entertainment Weekly/People.com/WB Bronze /Atlantic poster. I think a lot of those boards folded (or became paid services) because TPTB got fed up with the drama/bullshit that can happen in some communities.

Ahhhhh, I see. In the bits and pieces I shoved together in my head, I pictured a board divided, a great battle, and then a band of ruffians banding together and taking themselves overseas to start a new!colony that was the Buffistas.

I may have misunderstood this, but to be clear Buffistas evolved from Table Talk at Salon.com and W/X and not the WB Bronze, right?

Justin was nice to us. Not so nice to Deaton, methinks.

Though there was the painful emails Justin's business partner sent to Joss offering to build a board for a Mutant Enemy site where he continously called him "Josh."

Buffistas started as TableTalkers, i believe.

There are very, very few Bronzers here. Kristen brought me over to Table Talk about a year before it went pay-to-play and we moved to WorldCrossing.

I'm sad that I missed out on so many valuable years of Buffy discussion when I could have been there. I mean, I was sitting around in a dorm room, watching all the Buffy my roomie could stomach, trolling around the internet. Did I ever think to put the two together and look around? Nooooo. Of course not. That would have been too clever of me.